The Distance Between Us
by distantattraction
Summary: Marie married Cole Phelps before he went to fight in the war, but the man who came back to her was different in more ways than she could count. The more time went by, the more obvious it became that their relationship was falling apart. Cole/Marie drabbles with some Cole/Elsa thrown in at the end.
1. Halcyon Days

They'd met at school. Cole was a shining star even then-not quite the top of his class, but he had definitely earned his spot on the honor roll. Marie had been aware of him for months before she finally worked up the courage to actually _talk_ to him. Cole Phelps was as quiet you would expect an English major to be, but he had an unmistakable intensity about him. The way he would gnaw on his lip while pouring over a book, the way he would always be working and yet always have time to help out a classmate-it drew her attention to him.

They dated the whole of his senior year, broke up during hers, and were back together by the month after graduation. It seemed they just couldn't be apart.

Meeting him so long ago, Marie had really thought that she'd known him. But Cole hadn't even known himself back then, so what chance did she have?

When the war started, she knew he'd be going into the service. Cole had probably known it long before America even joined the fight. He had a way of understanding things that Marie could never quite comprehend, though she tried.

They made a plan. Cole hadn't wanted to get married before he left. He never explicitly said why, but he would always let his sentences trail off. "Just in case..." as if that would soften the blow. Marie couldn't stand the thought of Cole not coming home, and she hated that he was wise enough to keep it in mind. She told him that she wanted him to put that ring on her finger so he would have something to come home to. He said that he would always want to come home to her, whether they were married or not.

Three nights later, he was on one knee with a ring in his hand. Marie cried with joy and with relief.

They got married at City Hall. There wasn't exactly time to plan a big ceremony, and frankly, Marie didn't want one. All she wanted was Cole.

They met a few times during his time in OCS. Not nearly often enough for Marie to stop missing him when he was gone, and not often enough for her to stop worrying about him. It wasn't even often enough for Marie to have been able to tell Cole she was pregnant when she found out; she hadn't wanted to tell him in a letter or a phone call-she wanted to see his smile when she told him he was going to be a father. Marie didn't think he smiled enough, and plenty of their friends agreed.

He saw her one last time before his company shipped out. It was just one day-he'd woken up early enough that he could drive up north to spend a few precious hours with her before they had to leave. It was one of the sweetest things anyone had ever done for her.

Things were different after the war. She shouldn't have been surprised-how many people had told her that the things men saw on the battlefield changed them?-but she had thought that all of the reasons she loved Cole were fundamentally _him,_ that they couldn't possibly change.

And then he came back with a Silver Star and a Purple Heart that he wouldn't let her put on the mantel. Instead, he threw them into a drawer and stayed silent about what had happened out there, denied being the hero Marie knew he had to be. He threw himself into his work completely, and Marie supposed she couldn't blame him. A detective, after only a year on patrol? From what she heard, that didn't happen often. That sounded like the Cole she knew, the Cole she'd fallen in love with.

But his workload increased, his hours lengthened, and even she could no longer deny that the distance between them was growing. It was rare for dinner to be made for four, and there were nights when the girls went to bed without seeing their father. After a few weeks, even Marie gave up on waiting for hours for him to come home. When he was there, Cole barely spoke. He would ask how she was doing, how the girls were, pretend to listen to her cursory responses, and sit in the living room and read. He wore an expression Marie didn't recognize. One she had never seen on his face before the war, one that seemed never to leave his eyes now.

When she found out about that woman, that singer, she was angry. She had every right to be. She was angry and bitter and knew that she had to do something about it, but she could not honestly say that she was surprised.

Cole had come back home that night to try and talk, she thought. She had no idea what he could have possibly said, or what she could have said in return, but it ended up being that she didn't need to respond. Cole didn't have the words either. She didn't let him say goodbye. Not to her, not to their girls.

The girls, who were destined to be raised without their father. He had been overseas when they were born, at work when they started school, and now-

A sob tore from her throat as Marie stared down at the wedding ring she still wore. She didn't know how she was supposed to feel. It seemed as though she was an amalgamation of grief and rage, of bitterness and regret. Her husband was dead, her husband whom she had loved but must not have known, because she was sure that the Cole she had met at Stanford all those years ago would never hurt her.

But here she was, in this broken house for a broken family, with a heart that had been broken too many times in just a few months.


	2. Shakespeare

There were still signs, every now and then, of the man Marie had married. It was literature that did it, usually.

Shakespeare never changes. The words were the same when he left, when he dragged himself through the forests and death of Okinawa, when he came back to a world he almost didn't recognize. But nothing in his books had changed. To a man who felt that nothing was or would be the same again, that meant everything. That stability, as weak as it may have been, was all he had.

He wore a wistful smile as he read. Marie remembered that smile, remembered seeing it from afar whenever she spotted Cole studying back at Stanford. She missed that about him. She missed that Cole. He still came out sometimes when her husband read, but she couldn't interrupt him when he was involved in a book, no matter how much her heart ached.

And so it was that the one thing that made Cole feel like his old self, Marie could not share.

The distance between them grew without their consent, driving itself between them like a physical force. As Cole began spending more of his time at work, Marie began feeling less like they were married at all. It seemed like Cole was never home, and even when he was, he was worlds away, wrapped up in some story or another. The spark of nostalgia that had made her heart twinge when she watched him was replaced by resentment when she saw him connecting with words on a page more than he did with her. Worse still was when that resentment turned into apathy.

He was becoming a stranger to her, and she had no idea how to stop it. Sometimes, she wasn't even sure she cared.

A few times, she picked up Cole's books while he was at work. She would sit in his chair reading his books, trying as hard as she could to understand the texts in the hopes that she would understand him. But for Marie, they were just words, and Cole was just a man. He was as indecipherable to her as an epigraph printed in Latin at the top of a page.


	3. Pretending

There are times when he can pretend that things aren't the way they are.

Times when he can pretend that he doesn't know himself as well as he does.

Times when he can pretend that he's happy, or at least he will be once he can put the pieces together and solve this case.

Times when he can pretend that he and his wife still have anything in common but the surname she took after they signed the marriage license.

Times when he can pretend that he is the man he wanted to be, with the family and the good job with the steady income, with the nice house and decent car-

With the weight of sins unatoned for crushing him, reminding him that he cannot escape the past. Reminding him of the reason that he does everything that he does.

Those times that he can pretend don't last long. He doesn't let them.


	4. The Harder They Fall

He didn't know what it was about her. She was beautiful, yes, but he'd seen beautiful women before. None of them had ever made him feel this way, not even his own beautiful wife.

He supposed it came down to what Roy had said the night they were introduced. "You'll like her. She's something else." She was.

And he did.

At first, Cole was able to pretend that he just liked coming to the Blue Room. It was nice, having a place he could go to get a drink after a long day at work. He would never have admitted it to anyone, least of all Rusty, but the day he saw Celine Henry's corpse, curses scrawled across her naked body in blood red; the afternoon that they found Antonia Maldonado with a bloody channel across her throat; that night that they found Claudia Dominguez in her own home, a kitchen knife lodged in her heart and three other stab wounds in her chest-those days, Cole found that a glass of Scotch helped him sleep at night. And Cole had no doubt that he was treated well at the club. Alphonse and the others may have feared Roy's power, but they understood and reciprocated Cole's respect.

But eventually, he couldn't deny that he came to the Blue Room more often than he craved a drink. He couldn't ignore the fact that he tended to reward himself for a long day's work on the nights that he knew Elsa was performing.

He never acted on his feelings, though. If he didn't do anything, Cole kept telling himself, it was alright. So even though he went to see her perform so often that he started learning her lyrics without really trying, he never spoke to her. He just watched from his table as she swayed back and forth, filling the room with her voice.

The first time he ever said a word to her, it was during an interrogation. It may not have been as formal as it would have been had the conversation taken place at Hollywood station, but they both knew that it was serious. Cole also knew that Elsa recognized him from the audience, although she didn't mention it. He tried to treat it like any other interrogation, but the things she said struck a chord in him. He couldn't shake the feeling that there was more they had to say to each other.

Cole sat behind the wheel of his car for hours after he asked Roy for more time. He spent the wait with his thoughts chasing each other in circles; he couldn't pin down what it was he actually wanted to do. He thought about going back into the Blue Room to try to talk to Elsa again, this time without Roy and the case weighing him down, but he found himself glued to his seat.

When Elsa walked out to the taxi, he turned the key in the ignition without even considering what it was he was doing. He didn't know why he was following her. He didn't know why he kept making the same turns that her cab did when this was obviously a terrible idea. He didn't know what he was going to do when they got to Elsa's home. He just knew that he was keeping an eye on her, waiting to see which street they'd be going down next.

The hallway was his last chance to turn back without her ever knowing he'd been there. For a second, Cole thought he was going to do it-he'd just turn around and be gone. No one would be any the wiser.

And then his fist tapped the door. She answered quickly, as if she'd been waiting for him. Maybe she had been.

He never planned for it to happen. One moment they were just talking, and the next, he was kissing her across the table. And then the lights were off, and so were their clothes.

He never once thought it was a mistake.

When it all came crashing down around him-the suspension, the lawsuit, the separation from his family-he didn't mind it as much as he should have. He'd lost everything he had been working toward since he got back from the war, but Elsa helped him to realize that that wasn't all he had in his life. He had her. He had hope. He had a chance at actually being happy.

For once, no matter how much his head told him that this was wrong, he was doing something that felt right, that made him feel _good_.

Elsa didn't love him for the hero he was supposed to be, the hero that everyone else knew him as. To her, he wasn't the Silver Star-winning golden boy of the LAPD. He was just a man who fought for justice, who could see good in everyone but himself, who genuinely deserved to be happy no matter how little he believed it.

He was just Cole.

Things were definitely different after Elsa. Cole was happy when he was with her, but there was almost no one who treated him the same way as they did before the news broke. He knew by then that glory wasn't everything-Elsa wouldn't let him forget that-but he did miss it at times. It was difficult to separate himself from the thing which had been his goal for years.

But he had bigger things to worry about. Corruption ruled L.A., and he wanted to change that. And then there was the stolen morphine, still turning up all over the city-still being plunged into Elsa's arm. That was something in particular he wanted to fight. He had spent enough time with her to know that she was much stronger than she sometimes let herself believe. He knew that she could beat the addiction, and with his encouragement, she started to believe it too.

Cole found himself running through conversations in his head whenever he wasn't thinking about anything in particular. That he tended to dwell on the past was something he'd realized years ago, so he didn't really pay it any mind. He neither stopped himself nor actively initiated the memories; he just let them come. Sometimes he would think about Marie and the girls; other times it was Elsa; still others, he saw the faces of men who he needed to bring to justice.

One specific exchange kept coming up. After he and Roy had seen the aftermath of one woman's actions destroying the lives of four men, they had spoken about it. Cole had even said that life has a way of making you pay for your pride, a price that he was certainly paying now.

And, as it turned out, he _would_ throw it all away for a woman.

After all, who knew? Maybe it would turn out that he had thrown it all away for love.


End file.
